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The Changing Room

to a boathouse in a harbor in what they call the shoulder season, those weeks between the chaos of summer with traffic and tourists and hot muggy sunburns, and the first frosts of the winter to come.

You arrive at the top of a very high bluff with a vast harbor spread out before you. Then you climb down and down and down two very long flights of white washed steps then across the wooden planked dock …

To he Vose Boathouse an historic architectural wonder built directly in the Edgartown Harbor. The family received a letter of approval from the war department in 1899 (it hangs on the wall today) for it to be built there and nothing says Vintage Vineyard like this space.

We will begin our painterly tour with a peak into that first door you come to just through the dock gate on the bottom floor into what I have called the changing room

The lovingly maintained wooden doors, with their inlayed repairs for repurposed hardware, line two walls with small locker rooms that each have windows framing expansive views of the harbor and out across to the tiny island of Chappaquiddick.

The light bounces softly across the water and lays like a butterfly on the kid glove surfaces of that weathered wood then sparkles off of the lacquered canoes and the worn ochre of an oar.

But my favorite part is that there are spaces in between each floorboard through which you can see the iridescent sea beneath.

As the sun slants in the October morning light the colors below are breathtaking.

From the classic canoe to the sweeping parsons bench there is something solidly New England here.

It was so quiet when I was working there that the only sounds were the gulls cawing overhead and the gentle lapping of the wakes as the working fisherman motored their way out past the boathouse out to sea.

I can picture it now… in a family filled summer with the noises of children wriggling into swimsuits and parents toting wicker baskets which the grandparents have stuffed with picnics and rainhats…

and through the years and all of that chaos and glee I can feel the boathouse enfolding them all like a great big cedar wrapped hug.